The Smells of Red Tape

I know I've told yall before a little about the building I work in. It's run by Dick, not his real name, but so nicknamed for my dad's old phrase "he's tighter than Dick's hatband." So yep, he's cheap, but he's so much more. "Do-less" is the phrase we use here in the South. He's here, he's there, he's around, but never long enough to invest time and money and effort in doing what needs to be done to keep an aged, downtown building in adequate, if not tip-top, shape.

And so the toilets have overflowed, onto my sandaled foot, if you'll recall, and from November to March the back of the building where we park (The Bobsled Run) is covered with four-inch thick ice. The guttering over the back door is hanging. There's a hole in the ceiling of our back office, and a crack down the wall of our front one. The heating system, which I've never understood, it must have been installed by the Number 281 Blind Workers Local - the front offices will be freezing, the back offices will be aflame, and the thermostat has a locking cover on it so we have to ask them to come down and change the temperature. Speaking of locking covers, the toilet paper for the restrooms is also kept under lock and key, which we have learned to put up with since, in the beginning, Dick wanted us to provide our own toilet paper. Yes, I'll wait while you finish laughing.

One day we had to leave work early because of the overpowering gas smell in the building. Our heads hurt, our eyes burned. When we started getting a little loopy, we realized TheCompanyIWorkFor could make it one afternoon without it's B'field branch being in operation.

And now, we've got something new. To say "a smell" really does a disservice to it. For smells everywhere must cower in fear in the presence of what we've got going.

The best way to describe it would be that a rat ate a rat that'd eaten a rat that had bubonic plague. Then that rat crawled into a vat of raw sewage and died, presumably of rat poisoning, and began to decay as did every digested rat inside him. Then someone took a hose and set it in the sewage and air-pumped it into the vents of our building. And while it's confined mainly to the hallway, even with every door to our office closed tightly, it's still wafting in through the vents. It's a rancid, horrid smell, and it's been going on now for approximately five days. And it's getting worse.

Yesterday Dick popped into our office, smiling. "Wow, your office doesn't smell so bad, it's kind of nice." Our mouths hung open. He went on to tell us how his office upstairs was unbearable, but how "nice" it was that the smell downstairs was mainly just in the hallway. He also went on to say that it was sewage backed up, it was the town's responsiblity, and though he'd called the town, they didn't seem to be interested in doing anything about it. And so he sauntered off to who knows where, well, who knows where exactly, but we all know where generally, someplace that didn't smell like the bowels of a dead rat.

This morning I walked into work, through the back door of the building, as usual. The smell made me go weak at the knees. It was just ungodly. I immediately rolled my nose up like a window shade and contorted my face. It's basically been like that all day.

We then decided that waiting on Dick to do anything (especially since he's not around today) was not going to get us anywhere. We had the discussion yet again that we've been having for days, which is, breathing this for 8 hours a day over five days can not be good for one. What are we doing to our systems, sitting here breathing raw rat turd bubonic plague-ridden sewage filth? And then, Ms Poof got going.

Ms Poof (not her real name) is our go-to gal in the office. She likes to argue; in fact, she thrives on it. Whenever there's a tough case in the office and we need to blast underwriting or accounting, we give it to Ms Poof. We love it when she gets an error-filled phone bill. We gather to listen to her call and blast the phone company. It's entertainment. (My favorite exchange between TheCompanyIWorkFor and Ms Poof came when the someone in accounting told her "Now don't get huffy with me," and she replied, "Oh, trust me. You've haven't seen huffy.")

So Ms Poof got out the phone book and started making phone calls. She called the Sanitary Board, she called the Health Department. She called the Hazardous Waste Materials Department. She got bounced around a lot, but persistence is a strong suit with her, and so Ms Poof eventually got someone in Hazardous Waste (so to speak) to talk to her. We basically just wanted to know - are we safe sitting here inhaling this, if you'll pardon the expression, shit, or 7.2 years down the road are our heads going to suddenly explode from it building up inside us.

Here's the answer she got. And I love this. The person she spoke to said it sounded to her like what we were smelling was raw sewage that had methane gas in it. Now, I know my Dave Barry, and I know that methane gas build-ups are what make cows explode, right there whilst minding their own business, and with no warning whatsoever. He also told her that breathing this in - this is great - had no dangerous long term effects, just that it would make us sick while we were actually smelling it. Oh! Well, that makes it OK!

Then he said, in what has to be the mother of all governmental clusterfuck statements, that he could send a team of HazMat people out to look at our building. However, if they found anything at all amiss they would have to cite - our boss! Because they can't cite a landlord for such things. (Apparently there's a big landord lobby out there.) So, because it was the TheCompanyIWorkFor employee making the complaint, the TheCompanyIWorkFor boss would be cited. Even though the TheCompanyIWorkFor boss told the employee to call and complain about the smell!

I hate the government.